Despite 7.5 years of searching, Team America still hasn’t found the world’s top criminal. A recent paper by some UCLA folks (“Finding Osama bin Laden: An Application of Biogeographic Theories and Satellite Imagery”) proposes a simple but clever GIS-based approach to mapping the probability of Bin Laden’s presence. The paper depends on a lot of assumptions but most of them seem reasonable based on what little information is known to the public. Just ten years ago the specialized data needed to solve these problems was exclusively available to the military, but thanks to commercial satellite imagery and the Internet, academia can now do a pretty credible job. I’m curious what US intelligence thinks of all this. (And, I wonder, will they knock on any of the three doors identified by the algorithm in Parachinar, Pakistan?)